Browsing Posts published on August 5, 2013

This week, according to several reports, the world’s first burger made of cultured, or in-vitro, meat—meat grown in a laboratory, rather than carved out of a slaughtered animal—will be flown from the Netherlands (the location of the laboratory) to the United Kingdom, cooked (possibly by a celebrity chef) at “an exclusive west London venue”, and served to an unnamed diner, who may or may not be the so-far anonymous donor who helped to fund the project to produce the brave new meal (the Dutch government also supported the research).

The five-ounce Frankenburger, as some have called it, was created by Mark Post, a medical physiologist, and his assistants at Maastricht University using a special type of stem cell taken from the neck of a slaughtered cow. The first piece of “schmeat” ever created, it is “proof of concept”, as Post puts it, for the notion that edible, nutritious, and even palatable meat can be grown outside a living animal.

[Update:According to the New York Times and the BBC, the burger was served today, August 5, in London and consumed by three diners, including Post. The mystery donor was revealed to be Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google.]

Although the idea of growing meat in a lab is not new (Winston Churchill, as The Telegraph noted, predicted in 1932 that in fifty years’ time chicken breasts and wings would be grown “separately in a suitable medium”), until now no one had actually done it, largely because the necessary technologies for isolating and growing tissues from stem cells had not been developed. The techniques involved are also exceedingly complex, laborious, and expensive to execute. The burger to be served this week took two years to produce (its debut was originally schedueld for November of last year) and is estimated to have cost $325,000 (€250,000)—and that doesn’t include fries.

The next step, according to Post, is to invest in further research to speed up the production process and reduce costs. “If it can be done more efficiently, there’s no reason why it can’t be cheaper,” he told the New York Times. “It has to be done using the right materials, introducing recycling into the system, controlling labor through automation.”

Post’s achievement could mark the beginning of a revolution in food technology, with implications for the environment and human and animal welfare that are hard to overstate. The billions of additional human beings expected to exist by mid-century (bringing the total to more than 9 billion) and the growth of developing economies such as China’s will result in a doubling of world meat consumption by 2050, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Unless synthetic alternatives are developed, this means that the price of meat will skyrocket, and ever more of the world’s forests will be bulldozed into pastures and feed-producing farmland. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, already considerable, will increase accordingly, as will groundwater pollution from millions of tons of additional manure. And, of course, hundreds of billions more meat animals will suffer miserable lives and gruesome deaths on factory farms. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.

Why London’s pig café pop-up is a terrible idea for pigs: Teacup pigs are adorable. Unfortunately, they’re also a complete fabrication. But that isn’t stopping a local London specialty breeder and Yelp from putting on an adoption event to educate the public on “proper” micro pig care.